Bees!

Bees! All Natural and Sustainable, Keeping Bees in Affordable Top Bar Hives…

With trainer Megan Mahoney, the members learned to assess colony health, including the use of a mite count.

USAID/Partners of the Americas Farmer-to-Farmer volunteer Ayele Solomon led a mead-making training for the women.

Caring for the bees, working with them…

Getting stung, working hard, sweating in the heat, swearing, eating a taste of pollen and honey…

Being outdoors, physically active…

Teaching Portland parish beekeepers

Interesting to everyone…

Bees, bees, bees…

Cleaning the apiary

Also stimulated mentally, intellectually…

Always challenging…

Being part of a community, working together, being supportive… We’ve gotten so much from living and working with the bees, and we love them!

Expressing ourselves, being ambitious, paying attention…

Always interesting…

Freshly-harvested honey comb from our top bar hives

Top bar hives decorated bu Bee Club members in the training apiary

It’s really all about the bees…

Bees!

James

When we started our work with bees, our interest came out of the fact that our family doesn’t consume cane sugar; we use only honey. This is expensive! And we’d heard too many stories about how commercial honey is corrupted with additives, sometimes to the point where the honey bottle you buy in a store might contain no honey at all!

We decided to keep some bees just to provide for our family’s needs.

Somewhere along the line, as we identified as “beekeepers” and joined the community of our peers here in Jamaica, beekeeping stopped being just one of the things we do to increase the quality of food we eat, or to reduce our expenses – beekeeping became a passion and a source of real joy for our family.

Here we are, now: there is no plan for our future that does not, in some way, include bees. We are working with the bees as both practicing natural beekeepers and as advocates for a method that does more good than harm – for the bees, beekeepers and the consumers of bee products. Our goal is to help to move beekeeping toward economic and environmental sustainability – both for individual beekeepers and for the industry as a whole.

Along the way, we have to thank the bees for so much: they are endlessly interesting, challenging and productive. We can never be bored, and will never stop learning.

We have a nectar flow starting from (hopefully) around January to June. This is a best-case scenario. Bees do things in every month of the year, and there is always something to do to support them. If you want to harvest honey, the best months are from Feb. or March to early June. If you can’t make it here during that time, come whenever you can. We are always working with our bees, and through the year, there is no idle time.